On the plus side, they just introduced the ability to convert the reward points to Jet miles and we get 5% cashback in each stmt when shopping any grocery store like Food Bazaar or HyperCity etc.
There are no other fees like annual fee, add-on card fee, etc.
One thing you must watch out for is that its NOT enough to provide your 9 digit Jet FF #;
they also require your join date & exp date!
Many JP members have lifetime with no exp date and neither the JP card or the website mentions your join date after login so you are forced to call JP CC to get this info.
One hint is that your exp DD/MM is the same as your joining date so you still have to guess the year...
Unlike other cards [e.g., HDFC & DB] which allow 1 point/mile, SCB charges 1.2 points for each JP mile so its 20% more expensive to convert your points.
The biggest headache is that unlike other cards the morons at SCB make you pay EACH add-on card instead of a single payment to cover the primary & all add-ons!
Even for ECS we have to submit a form for EACH add-on which is insane.
The monthly bills come in different envelopes for each card which is another waste of money & paper...
Needless to say despite paying MORE than the total amount due, we got hit with interest charges that had to be waived off after arguing with customer service.
Despite claiming a very high rate of 2.99% monthly [42% annually compounded NOT 36% which is SIMPLE interest] its actually much MORE than that due to the magic of ’double cycle billing’ which should be banned by the RBI.
If you are late on any payment, the interest does NOT start from the DUE date but goes back to the purchase dates of the transactions which adds 1-2 weeks more on avg.
When we divided the total interest payable by the amount due, it came to over 6% monthly!
Now we did manage to get half the interest waived off since it was our fault for forgetting to pay but its still a shocker.
So why do we still have this card and why is it recommended?
Simply because the 5% monthly cashback offset most of the aggravations.
They are also nice enough to send a SMS whenever a fee waiver is approved which all banks should do.
So you never have to call back to check the status of any waiver request.
The other nice feature for online payments is that SCB allows a ’personal message’ to be displayed when you reach a ’verified by visa’ page for password entry.
Its an excellent place to put in some kind of password hint since some morons like citibank have additional requirements for creating these passwords like having a non-alphanumeric character [e.g., some symbol].
Its a good deal for people who use their cards at grocery stores AND pay their bills in full on time.
You can do this online with billDesk anytime if you have netbanking with a major bank so no need to write any cheques or find any dropboxes.